Life insurance market in Western Balkan

The transition to green economies is considered to be a key driver of sustainable economic development. Growing awareness of environmental costs and their integration into corporate performance reporting has led to the development of a new environmental dimension of accounting. Although it is a modern concept, its integration into the tourist business community is important, especially because tourism is recognized as energy and emission intensive. As preserving the environment can create an optimal framework that is in the function of the development of sustainable tourism in Montenegro, this paper discusses and analyzes the degree of knowledge of tourism companies on the application of the green concept, especially through the prism of socially responsible business. The research study was conducted by applying the classification Decision tree model (DT) on the data obtained by surveying employees and owners of Montenegrin tourism companies. The DT method has shown that socio-demographic factors have a significant impact on understanding the importance of green accounting in the tourism sector of Montenegro and that most tourism companies include corporate social responsibility in their business strategy and policy. The fact that the same or similar research on this topic has not been done in Montenegro, but also in neighboring countries, indicates an important contribution that this paper may have for the scientific and professional community, primarily in the form of incentives to create and publish reports on environmental protection.

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The aim of this paper is to analyse the level of digitalized financial reporting process in local governments of three different Montenegrin geographic regions and to estimate the level of harmonization with the modern achievements in the domain of computerization of accounting systems. For that purpose, two research approaches (direct insight and survey) are used to examine the general hypothesis. This hypothesis states that the digitalization of financial reporting in different regions in Montenegro depends on the level of the accounting culture of companies, but also on their size, activities and normative acts. The fact that similar research has not been previously conducted in Montenegro, or in the neighbouring countries, which makes this study an original contribution.

Insurance companies are facing major challenges that point to the need for control process and risk management. Risk management in insurance has a direct impact on solvency, economic security, and overall financial stability of insurance companies. It is very important for insurance companies to adequately calculate risks to which they are exposed. Asset liability management (ALM), as an integrated approach to financial management, requires simultaneous decision-making about categories and values of assets and liabilities in order to establish the optimum volume and the ratio of assets and liabilities, with the understanding of complexity of the financial market in which financial institutions operate. ALM focuses on a significant number of risks, whereby the emphasis in this paper will be on interest rate risk which indicates potential losses that may reflect in a lower interest margin, a lower value of assets or both, in terms of changes in interest rates. In the above context, the aim of this paper is to show how to protect from interest rate changes and how these changes influence the insurance market in Montenegro, both from the theoretical and the practical point of view. The authors consider this to be an interesting and very important topic, especially because the life insurance market in Montenegro is underdeveloped and subject to fluctuations. Also, taking into account the fact that Montenegro is a country that has been making serious efforts to join the EU, it is expected that insurance companies in Montenegro will strengthen their financial position in the market even using the ALM traditional techniques, which is shown in this paper.